A German reality show for older women who just wanted to find friends has cured them of their need for company. Derek Scally reports
The Golden Girls will never die, living on forever in the netherworld of late-night repeats. But now they have new competition from Germany's "The Silver Girls", a docusoap following five women over 60 in a flatshare in Berlin.
The programme started out as a grey version of MTV's "The Real World" before veering into "Big Brother"-style personality clashes and ending more like "I'm a Pensioner, Get Me Out of Here!" Series director Alice Agneskirchner (38) came up with the idea after a fruitless search for a new home and company for her elderly father that would spare him the indignity of an old people's home.
"You can count the number of older flat shares in Berlin on one hand," she told the Tageszeitung newspaper. "I was drawn to the docusoap format because I didn't find any flatshares that weren't already being dissolved." She advertised for over-60s senior citizens willing to share an apartment for eight weeks, with an option of remaining on. She got around 100 replies, 93 from women.
Instead of the Golden Girls of Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia, the Silver Girls gives us the more Germanic-sounding Herta, Ilka, Mechthild, Roswitha and Ursula. The German girls dress better than the Miami girls, there's no cheesecake in sight, and they're entertaining in a whole other way.
"Until now the only time ageing is addressed on television is in health shows but never in entertainment," says Agneskirchner of her motivation behind the series.
The Silver Girls all admitted a common motivation for participating in the experiment: the fear of isolation and the fear of becoming a burden on family.
"I have such a fear that my daughter isn't interested in spending Christmas with me," says Ursula Peters, one of the Silver Girls. "Last Christmas I invited my daughter and a few friends around. We had a good time, drank a lot and at some point I had a blackout. That's when all my worries came out: that I'll kill myself if I end up in an old people's home. Me!" With a light touch, the series tackles issues of older people but also challenges age-old old age assumptions.
The first episodes show the women coming together in their seven-room apartment, the idealistic trip to IKEA and the inevitable group chats about getting old and living alone.
But the initial harmony is soon replaced with the usual flatshare rows about cleaning and telephone bills. They may be older, but the Silver Girls are no wiser.
"I noticed fairly early on during the shoot that the age group no longer played a role," says Agneskirchner. The strength of the Golden Girls was the sitcom's situation: the four women may have had a shared taste for sickly pastel hues but they had completely different personalities. What is self-evident in sitcom land, however, isn't often the case in reality. And so, from episode one "The Silver Girls" tackles the assumption that ageing somehow homogenises people.
"My whole life long I never lived in a compartment drawer and suddenly, as soon as you're over 60, you land in a drawer," says Mechthild Lenz, another of the "Silver Girls". "That just can't continue long-term, that you lump together the entire group of non-working people into one group. Sometimes there can be an age difference between us of 30 years."
The dream of finding like-minded flatmates to ward off isolation is clear from the number of group activities in the first episodes, such as a trip to see East German rockers "The Puhdys" in concert.
But by the fourth episode the Silver Girls are completely sick of each other and desperately doing their own thing to get out of the house and away from their roommates.
"The Silver Girls" is compelling viewing for showing how the search for solidarity and friendship in old age too often clashes with the roommates' wildly different personalities.
Still, it's not warts-and-all television: like "The Real World", the cameras are only present when the women agree and, unlike "Big Brother", the flatmates are not filmed round the clock.
Ursula is the star of the show, a witty, self-ironic artist with a wild spirit and a liking for mess. It's not long before she is sparring with Mechthild, the orderly art historian. By week five, one of them moves out.
Three weeks later, despite their initial optimism, the other "Silver Girls" went their separate ways, relieved the experiment was over.
"At first I felt so liberated," said Mechthild. "It was just very stressful ... because the group was not very homogenous. But I don't regret it." Curiously enough, their experience has appeared to have cured the women of their need for company.
"I heard from the others that they would rather be damned than live in a flatshare in their declining years," said Ursula. "Just give me my own apartment any day."